What Becomes (3 page)

He wanted to go to her and say:
I've watched this before, been near it – the way that a human being will drop and break inside, their eyes dying first and then their face, a last raising of light and then it goes from them, is fallen and won't come back. They walk into our building and whatever they think and whatever we have told them, there is a person in their mind, a living, unharmed person they expect to greet them and return their world. Then our attendants lead them to the special room, to the echoing room, and they see nothing, no one, no return, a shape of meat, an injury. Some of them cry, some accept the quiet suggestion of tea and the plate of biscuits we set down to make things seem homely and natural and as if life is going on, because it is, that is what it does – picks us up and feeds us with itself, drives us on until we wear away. Some of them are quiet, inward. Some I can hear, even in my office. They rage for their lovers, their loves, for their dead love, their dead selves. And they rage for their children. And they fail to accommodate their pain. And they leave us in the end, because they cannot stay. They go outside and fall into existence. Our town is full of people running back and forth in torn days and every other town is like that, too. Our world is thick with it, clotted in patterns and patterns of grief. And, beyond this, I know you're sad. I know your days are bleeding, too. And I know I make you sad. I don't understand how not to, but please don't bring in more of the grief, don't add to it. If there is more, then I won't be able to breathe and I'll die.

And I miss her, too.

And I miss her like you do.

The no one who comes home with you holding your hand.

The girl who isn't there to mind when I hurt myself.

‘That'll be okay, then.'

Frank saw the young man's sneakers, the intentionally bedraggled cuffs of his jeans. Frank looked at them through his fingers, keeping his head low. ‘I'm sorry.' This emerging less as a question than a statement, a confession. He rubbed his neck, his helpless sweat, and said again, more clearly and correctly, ‘I'm sorry?'

‘The projectionist's just coming back. You can go in and wait.'

Oh, I know about that, I've done that. Wait. I can do that. Past master.

Frank swallowed while his anger crested and then sank. These spasms were never long-lasting, although they used to be less frequent. That could be a cause for concern, his increased capacity for hatred.

‘Are you okay?'

The boy staring with what appeared to be mild distaste when Frank straightened himself and looked up. ‘No. At least, yes. I am okay. I have a headache, that's all.'

Standing seemed to take an extremely long time, Frank trying not to fall or stagger as he pressed himself up through the heavy air. He was taller than the boy, ought to be able to dominate him, but instead Frank nodded, holding his cap in both hands – something imploring in this, something anachronistic and disturbing – and he cranked out one step and then another, jolted back to the doorway of the cinema and through.

The dark was a relief, peaceful. He felt smoother, healthier as soon as it wrapped him round, cuddled at his back and opened ahead to let him pad down the gentle slope and find a new seat.

It was actually good that his film had been delayed. This way, his evening would be eaten up – back to the hotel after and head straight for bed. Double bed. Only one of him. No need to pick a side: her side, his side. He could lie where he wanted.

She preferred the left. He'd supposed this was somehow to do with the bedroom door being on the right. Any threat would come in from the right and he would be set in place to meet it. Frank had thought she was letting him guard her while she slept: Frank who was perfectly happy on whatever side was left free, who might as well rest at the foot of the bed like a folded blanket. It didn't matter. He didn't mind.

Really, though, she didn't expect Frank to defend her. Her choice had nothing to do with him. In fact, they'd had other bedrooms with the door in other places and with windows that could be climbed through, you had to consider them, too – their current window was to the left – and she'd still always lain on the left. She liked that, or was used to it, or had given it some importance which couldn't be altered now. Her book, her water glass, they were left.

She hadn't read on their last night, at least he didn't think so. He'd waited for her in the kitchen with the soup and she'd never come down. He'd cleaned up his blood and repotted the plant and listened to the sound of the water draining from her bath and her naked footsteps on the landing, not moving towards the stairs. Then he'd decided his first cleaning hadn't been thorough and he'd scrubbed the place completely – work surfaces, floor, emptied out the fridge and wiped it down, made it tidy. The cupboards needed tidying, as well. That took quite a time. Finally, he decanted the rest of the soup into a container, washed the pot, looked at the container, emptied it into the bin and washed the container.

It was two in the morning when he was done.

And when he had slipped into bed he had expected her to be sleeping, because that would be best.

‘What were you doing?' Only she wasn't asleep, she was just lying on her back without the light on and waiting to ask him, ‘What were you doing?'

‘I . . . cleaning.'

‘What's wrong with you.'

And Frank couldn't tell her because he didn't know and so he just said, ‘I understand why people look at fountains, or at the sea. Because those don't stop. The water moves and keeps on moving, the tide withdraws and then returns and it keeps on going and keeps on. It's like –' He could hear her shifting, feel her sitting up, but not reaching for him. ‘It's like that button you get on stereos, on those little personal players – there's always the button that lets you repeat – not just the album, but the track, one single track. They've anticipated you'll want to repeat one track, over and over, so those three or four minutes can stay, you can keep that time steady in your head, roll it back, fold it back. They know you'll want that. I want that. Just three or four minutes that come back.' Which he'd been afraid of while he'd heard it and when he'd stopped speaking she was breathing peculiarly, loudly, unevenly, the way she would before she cried. So he'd started again, because he had no tolerance for that, not even the idea of that. ‘I want a second, three, four seconds, that would be all. I want everything back. No stopping, I want nothing to stop.' Only he was crying now, too – no way to avoid it. ‘I want her to be –' His sentence interrupted when she hit him, punched out at his chest and then a blow against his eye causing this burst of greyish colour and more pains and he'd caught her wrists eventually, almost fought her, the crown of her head banging against his chin, jarring him.

Afterwards they had rested, his head on her stomach, both of them still weeping, too loudly, too deeply, the din of it ripping something in his head. But even that had gone eventually, and there had been silence and he had tried to kiss her and she had not allowed it.

That was when he had taken his bag and left the room, the house, the town, the life.

I miss her, too.

Behind Frank, the projector stuttered and whirred, light springing to the screen and sound this time along with it. He fumbled into his pocket and found his phone, turned it off. That way he wouldn't know when it didn't ring, kept on not ringing.

Frank tipped back his head and watched the opening titles, the mist, the trees, the older man's face as it spoke to the small girl's, as he spoke to his daughter. And the world turned unreliable and lost him and the film reeled on and he knew that it would finish and knew that when it did he would want nothing more than to start it again.

WASPS

Their da going away again, that's all it was. Both boys saying nothing about it, but awake at five and thumping downstairs and straight out to the garden, Jimbo still wearing pyjamas and Sam in his yesterday's clothes, probably no pants – some objection he has at the moment to pants, as if they were practically nappies and grown-ups never wore them. The first fight beginning as soon as they left the house: she has a memory of dozing through whole cycles of shouts and squealing and that odd, flat roar Sam has started to produce whenever he truly abandons himself and just rages. No tantrums for Sam, not any more. He is seven now. He has the real thing. He has rage.

And the morning was out of its balance already, aggressive. Orange-pink light had been creeping forward and threatening by four, summer pushing everything earlier and earlier whether you wanted it to or not, and the bed too hot and what might be called a real gale had been rising outside until her sleep was full of its pressure against the corner of the house, air leaning so hard at the window glass that she felt breathless and unsettled, searched by a hunger that needed, that pried.

The house grew disturbed, doors pestering at their frames whenever the weather drew breath: clatters on the roof, something twisting, scouring overhead, and meanwhile she dreamed a little of being underwater, swimming the length of an assault course, both a game and an assault course, in some kind of terrible amusement park. She was fully dressed, heavy, but doing her best to thread a way along flooded passages, over ramps, gasping up into sudden pockets of lovely air and then driving herself back down to find this or that opening into caves, or water-filled dining rooms, church halls, or a place like a fishmonger's shop, except every fish in it still alive – tethered by hooks through the bodies and heads, fluttering by the white-tiled walls and hanging in strings of blood, staring at her while she kicked and wallowed past.

All the time, she'd kept thinking, ‘I shan't bring the children here, it seems unsafe. There must surely be someone I could inform, a procedure to follow for complaints. What I need is a higher authority – one I would ask to set right.'

The logic of it mostly faded as she woke, but she had been left with a definite shame, the embarrassed an-ticipation that she might drown, be lost somewhere in the game when nobody else had a problem with it, because it was, in fact, so simple and undemanding – like a tunnel of love, or a ghost train, a romp round the funhouse mirrors and then back to have your tea.

By the time she leaned round and looked at the alarm it was getting on for half past seven, and the boys were still noisy, loud against the weather. Which was how they dealt with it – the leaving – by giving each other reasons to cry and reasons to be angry. Their father was curled on his side, hands tucked under his chin and offering her that face, the one that always made her think he wasn't sleeping, was only waiting with his eyes closed until she had gone, or until something interesting happened, a surprise. Although as a couple they weren't much prone to surprises. Predictable, was Ray.

She dressed in a T-shirt and cardigan, what used to be good jeans – as if she were someone who could be stylish, but was presently relaxed – the weekend was when you relaxed – and then she went to the windowsill so she could check on the wasps. There always were wasps. Always dead – or else weak and sleepy, crawling off to a permanent halt behind the chest of drawers. Five today. All goners. As if the house drew them and then destroyed them. Ridiculously fragile wings, perfect stripes and tapered bodies, altogether finely worked – they were like very tiny toys. Of course, you quite naturally worried that somebody would barefoot on top of one by mistake. The boys not really at risk, though, because they were not allowed into Mummy and Daddy's bedroom. None of that letting the kids burrow in between their parents for the night – could ruin a marriage, nonsense like that. And the bed wasn't big enough for four. Not even three.

She cupped the wasps up in her hand, the window frame shuddering beside her as the storm sneaked in a draught to stir the dead wings, their stiffened weightlessness. She patted the glass, smiled and left the room and let the corridor draw her along, then the stairs, another corridor until she arrived in the kitchen, because she would forever and ever arrive in the kitchen – no will or effort necessary: there she would be in unironed clothes, nothing to show what was left of her shape – as scruffy as her children, an inadequate bloodline no doubt apparent in every fault the three of them displayed.

But no time for morbid reflection – she walked to the back door, opened it and called her sons, opened it and opened her palm, let the clean breeze take the wasps and make them gone.

And now.

Sunday today, so she made a proper breakfast: a nice hearty send-off for Ray. He'd be gone before lunch and who knew what he'd be eating while he was away.

Sausage, fried eggs, bacon, black pudding, toast
and
potato scones, ketchup, peanut butter, marmalade – enough to finally lure the boys into the kitchen on smell alone. As she could have guessed, they were not speaking: Jimbo tearful and Sam brooding, each of them, she knew, on the verge of telling her how badly they'd been treated by the other and how wrong everything was.

She decided to get in first, impose order. ‘Wash your hands, they're horrible.'

‘I can't.' Jimbo displaying a pretty much unscathed hand. ‘Sam hit my thumb with a stone and made it bleed.' She settled her fingers on his forehead, felt the race of the storm still caught there: its lightness and its cold.

‘He hit
me
all morning. He always hits me. And you always let him.' Sam washing his own hands thoroughly, theatrically, with the air of a weary surgeon. As she watched, the weight of an older brother's tribulations and sad duties hardens his jaw enough for him to look very much like his father. ‘My foot is bleeding. But I never said.'

She offered him a plateful of everything, but failed to catch his eye, Sam having developed a habit of speaking to their floors. ‘I never said anything.' He is growing increasingly oblique.